AfterDawn: News

Mozilla's Firefox hits 5-year lows in browser market share, Chrome gains

According to the latest Net Applications data, Firefox has hit a 5-year low in browser market share.

February saw the launch of Firefox 27, Chrome 33 and continued migration to IE11, which is the browser of choice in Windows 8.1.



Internet Explorer (in all versions) remained flat, losing just 0.02 percentage points, falling to 58.19 percent share. Firefox fell nearly half a percent to 17.68 percent and Chrome took everyone's losses and turned them to gains, jumping to 16.84 percent from 16.28 percent.

Rounding out the top 5, both Safari and Opera fell marginally, to 5.67 percent and 1.23 percent, respectively.

In 2012, Internet Explorer hit all-time lows at around 51 percent share, but has slowly rebounded and appears to be aiming at 60 percent share again by the end of the year. Firefox had been above 18 percent share since April 2008, so Mozilla clearly needs to begin thinking strategy to stem more losses. Chrome has stayed between 15 and 19 percent for the last two years, and appears stagnant. Chrome could soon pass Firefox though, which it got within hundredths of a percentage point of doing so in May 2012 and July 2013.

Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 3 Mar 2014 19:32

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• 18 comments

• bhetrick

  Hmmm.
  
  So the masses are still choosing Chrome even given their data mining practices?
  

  4.3.2014 10:46 #1

• nintenut

  Originally posted by bhetrick: Hmmm.
  
  So the masses are still choosing Chrome even given their data mining practices?
  Most folk don't know about that. All they see is one of the fastest, lightest browsers available.
  
  I'm fond of SRWare Iron, myself. If Firefox decides to dump all the bloat its accumulated in the last few years, I'll be more than happy to switch back.
  

  
  

  4.3.2014 15:13 #2

• zxe

  It all makes me laugh, i use Opera, which changed how it worked, Chrome, creates to many threads, Firefox, seems to update nearly every week. They all put the bloat ware in calling it functionality

  5.3.2014 09:01 #3

• Jemborg

  I love me Firefox.
  

  Its a lot easier being righteous than right.
  
  
  

  5.3.2014 14:28 #4

• Bozobub

  Firefox is still my browser of choice and I won't touch Chrome with someone ELSE'S 11-foot pole, but the Firefox devs have been trying their damnedest to push me away, pretty much constantly since the move to the new version numbering.
  
  If you read their devlogs any, you end up seeing a LOT of arrogance from the Firefox devs. Don't take my word for it, check 'em out yourself.

  5.3.2014 15:58 #5

• getanacct

  I love Firefox as well, but I've been using Opera more and more, and I also use stuff like DuckDuckGo for anonymous searching for anything, whether on Chrome, or any browser.
  

  5.3.2014 16:03 #6

• Jemborg

  Originally posted by getanacct: I love Firefox as well, but I've been using Opera more and more, and I also use stuff like DuckDuckGo for anonymous searching for anything, whether on Chrome, or any browser. I'll check it out.
  

  Its a lot easier being righteous than right.
  
  
  

  5.3.2014 22:19 #7

• 2oldGeek

  I'm an old FF man myself and will stick with it. DuckDuckGo is good but StartPage HTTPS is better IMHO.
  

  
  
  There are three kinds of men: The ones that learn by reading; The few who learn by observation;
  The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence and find out for themselves...

  6.3.2014 00:08 #8

• Jemborg

  Originally posted by 2oldGeek: I'm an old FF man myself and will stick with it. DuckDuckGo is good but StartPage HTTPS is better IMHO. Cheers.
  

  Its a lot easier being righteous than right.
  
  
  

  6.3.2014 00:58 #9

• Mrguss

  I use Tor https://www.torproject.org/ everyday. FF 2nd. & DuckDuckGo for FULL search. It take me around 1 hr. to customize the 2 browser to look similar: after upgrading them.
  
  I try to stay as far away from Google & Microsoft.
  

  The rule above all the rules is: Survive !
  Capitalism: Funnel most of the $$$ to the already rich.

  6.3.2014 11:05 #10

• SProdigy

  I've found myself using Chrome more and more as Firefox has this endless memory bug, where it ends up consuming up to a gigabyte of memory, no matter how many, or how few, of browser tabs/windows I have open.

  6.3.2014 12:20 #11

• Bozobub

  I tried the three plugins here suggested for this issue and it had *some* impact on the current FF memory leak. Immediately before, I was seeing 500 MB+ usage, which was also constantly, visibly increasing. Now, 400-424 MB, fluctuating, but not increasing.
  
  Still a bit insane for a browser.

  6.3.2014 13:34 #12

• jhvance

  I used Opera for many years -- paid for v4-something to eliminate the ads and kept with it up to the point where its developers completely restructured the mail database and rendered the UI wholly nonfunctional with no backwards compatibility, at which point I became completely fed up with its consistent memory leaking/hogging problem and shifted completely to Firefox. Although generally satisfied with FF afterwards, in the past year it's become more and more prone to memory overloading problems and of late, a really pernicious profile-corruption tendency that has repeatedly forced me to create a completely new profile and go through the tedious/laborious process of re-establishing the customized appearance and functionality I've established. I'm not at all inclined to use Chrome and will only use IE sparingly for Windows Updates and a few websites with embedded ActiveX whose functionality effectively requires IE, but the general tendency of FF towards increased bloatware and lesser reliability does not make for a happy and content user, so the decline in market share comes as no surprise.
  

  7.3.2014 13:21 #13

• pmshah

  I have started using PaleMoon, a variant of Firefox with all the overheads removed. It is pretty fast and trouble free. It accepts all the addons, too. Use Chrome only for checking my mail fro Amazon.de for its translation facility.

  7.3.2014 23:35 #14

• Jemborg

  Originally posted by pmshah: I have started using PaleMoon, a variant of Firefox with all the overheads removed. It is pretty fast and trouble free. It accepts all the addons, too. Use Chrome only for checking my mail fro Amazon.de for its translation facility. That's interesting.
  

  Its a lot easier being righteous than right.
  
  
  

  8.3.2014 08:21 #15

• GernBlan

  I use Chrome and don't really care about the datamining. It's no more of an intrusion or privacy violation than what my ISP does, my mobile phone company does, my place of business does, public hotspots do, etc. The only time I still use BloatFox is on my Android tablet due to the lingering use of Flash on the internet that both Android Chrome and the stock Android browser no longer supports. I do't want bloat -- I want fast.
  
  The only Mozilla product I still use on my PC is Thunderbird, and they stopped development of it (in their infinite wisdom).

  9.3.2014 11:53 #16

• aldan

  ive been using comodo dragon.its a chrome based browser that they say is more secure than chrome.dont know how true that is but when they asked me to sign into dragon it comes up as signing into google chrome which i will gladly do....when hell freezes over.
  

  9.3.2014 16:48 #17

• 2oldGeek

  I have used Firefox since its birth and will continue. At my age I hate change and get very upset when my wife puts something back in the fridge in the wrong place. lol
  Bloat has no effect on me, I have a fast computer with lots of RAM and have made speed tweaks to Firefox. For privacy and keeping Google out of my life I use StartPage HTTPS for searches, Disconnect and Self-Destructing cookies to block the trackers.

  9.3.2014 17:27 #18